On assignment from the Ministry of Culture, a working group appointed by the Language Council of Norway prepared a plan for the establishment of Språkbanken in 2008. In 2009, questions of organisation and affiliation were more closely examined, and the National Library was commissioned to realise Språkbanken.

In the abovementioned white paper, the overarching goals of Språkbanken are expressed. Språkbanken shall build up and secure the quality of digital language resources for Norwegian and ensure that these resources are easily accessible for the language technology industry, linguistic research and education, and for public administration. This way, the establishment of Språkbanken is a major language policy measure to ensure the development of language technology solutions based on the Norwegian language. Språkbanken is a high priority action to strengthen the use of Norwegian in an area that is typically dominated by the major world languages.

The need for establishing a publically available language resource collection was pointed out already in the 1990s. Preparatory reports have been presented earlier. One document available in English is the following report from 2002: